The public service that is rarely mentioned in stories about austerity is prisons. Currently, prison governors were instructed by Britain’s justice minister, Alex Chalk, to release prisoners two months early to alleviate overcrowding, as 99.7% of prisons were at full capacity. This desperate measure highlights the dire situation. Imagine if hospitals were asked to discharge patients early due to full ambulances in the car park, or schools were forced to leave students unattended due to a shortage of teachers. The increasing prison population is a clear indication of societal decay. Britain became the first European country to outsource prison management to private organisations, back in 1990. Following a model similar to that of Hotel chains like Hilton and Marriot, the functioning of this model is majorly categorised into 2 formats – the private security firms can design their prisons and compete for a bid, or the government opens a bid for the existing prison operations. While this model has given birth to more and more prison companies, it certainly has not helped prison policy reform. But this is not the first time Britain is facing such a crisis. In 1960, there were 30,000 individuals incarcerated in England and Wales, deemed a crisis by the government at the time. By 2000, the number had doubled to around 60,000, and it is projected to reach up to 105,000 by 2027. The UK currently imprisons nearly 150 individuals per 100,000 people, while Germany detains 70 per 100,000. This disparity reflects the UK’s high incarceration rate, the largest in Western Europe. In 2020, the prison population surged due to a reduction in normal sentence remission from half to a third, alongside 25,000 immigrants and asylum seekers in detention awaiting processing. The court system’s chaos is evident with 15,000 individuals on remand, presumed innocent until proven guilty. Incarceration is costly, with each prisoner costing £48,000 annually. British penal policy is stuck in the philosophical dark ages and obsessed with retribution rather than rehabilitation. Their prisons are not havens of recovery, but academies of crime. Overcrowding has made prisons even less able to do their job. Two and even three prisoners are being confined to cells designed for one. Staff shortages mean that they can be locked up for 22 hours a day and denied exercise, communal contact or rehabilitation. These numbers suggest a deeper underlying issue in the prison system of Britain that the country needs to reevaluate in order to avoid an unavoidable crash that seems closer compared to what the administrators might think.